Max was born in October 2008 at Georgetown University Hospital. After more than four months at GUH, Max moved to the HSC Pediatric Center in March 2009. He came home six months after he was born, in April 2009.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

The budding athlete

For the past several days Max and Felix have been enjoying a bout with a classic winter head cold. The best thing about these colds is that they remind me how idyllic life is when the kids don't have colds. In the same way, I wake up every morning and savor the sensation of not having a toothache. (Unless I actually have a toothache, in which case I take far too much Ibuprofen and hope it goes away. a surprisingly effective strategy.) The post-nasal drip and congestion are really hard on Max, because the mucus has to run down the same course as his feeding tube. It seems that his reflux is more aggressive and appetite worse when he's sick. This set of colds appear, knock on wood, to have run their course.

Another double-edged benefit of a cold is that Max is more likely to sneeze out his feeding tube, allowing us to take picture of him without his facetape. Here's a picture of him in the morning sunlight, holding a football:

Max is obsessed with balls of all kinds, and has shown some mastery of the football, whose aerodynamic properties are unfathomable to those of us who had to wait until age 8 to handle one. Indeed, more broadly, Max entertains himself with basketballs, soccer balls and so on for long stretches of time. It is my theory that he has inherited the sports gene that I sadly lack. Either it skipped a generation, or he got it from his mother, or possibly both.

The embedded video below (click here if you don't see it) shows Max catching, throwing and scampering after various balls. Indeed, over the past couple of weeks, Max seems to be diligently studying the fine art of crawling. He doesn't (as you'll see) have the skill mastered, but he's getting better.

Carolyn asked that I produce a concise best-of-Max-crawling video to avoid boring everyone. It's surprisingly difficult to cook 45 minutes of raw footage into a 90 second highlight reel. So far the best I've been able to manage is the seven-and-a-half minute video below. At least you get to listen to Alan Bean describe a sunrise while on a spacewalk.